Not early enough, you need to possibly go pre-RomanHow can slavic paganism be wanked at it's max? The PoD is 860
Not early enough, you need to possibly go pre-Roman
I think you would have to destroy German paganism in order to do it and then have it push towards were the Roman Empire was, so more like 500BCEOk... the PoD is 200 AD then
Well, I wouldn't say "wanked", more "survived for longer than the rest".What was it that in OTL wanked Lithuanian paganism for so long? Is there a way to get something similar, only for the Slavs instead?
The question is how much of a wank Neoplatonism can get. Historically it was tried in many incarnations and none really grabbed people in the long term, always remaining a rather elitist thing.Number one, nerf Christianity, number two, wank Neoplatonism. Insert a great philosopher or two in Slavic Europe, and by 1000 AD, Slavic Europe ends up with a full-formed, well-organised religion akin to Slavic Hinduism. It will have some manner of philosophy surrounding it too, as Hinduism always had. And the extent of Slavic Europe is probably far more in this timeline, probably to the Elbe as well as most of Southern Austria, and unlike OTL, not likely to be dislodged thanks to conquest/assimilation or such.
Is that good enough of a wank? It seems like a start.
Nerfing Christianity is the best bet imo.Nerfing Christianity at 200 CE is possible, but it´s interesting how you`d do it. One option I explored in my timeline Res Novae Romanae is more militant Christan groups in reaction to the Decian persecutions.
Hinduism had a hell of a lot going for it though unlike Platonism. Whilst Hinduism was rich with lots of different philosophical positions and deities from the subcontinent, there was and is a common theological basis for all the "Vedic faiths" in terms of the Vedas, even if you did not subscribe to a specific philosophy. 2 people could believe that Vishnu/Shiva is the Ishvara, hold a layman/elitist position on Moksha, be pacifistic/a warrior etc whilst still having in common the eternal way put forward in a shared grand mythology and even taking from each others scriptures (e.g. It not being unheard of for Shaivanites to discuss the Gita) in a way that is still philosophically consistent. I can be a devotee of Krishna and look at Vishnu as the embodiment of the wild for instance, justifying and fitting it in to my world view whilst being consistent to the joint mythologyNeoplatonism looks like a great idea, and, @CountPeter , if you wed it with a grassroots-popular tale about the rebirths of your soul or something like it, I think it might work nicely. Maybe not as the exclusive philosophy: once again, the Hindu Synthesis didn`t build on only one of the Indian philosophical schools, either.
[/QUOTE]Nerfing Christianity is the best bet imo.
Hinduism had a hell of a lot going for it though unlike Platonism. Whilst Hinduism was rich with lots of different philosophical positions and deities from the subcontinent, there was and is a common theological basis for all the "Vedic faiths" in terms of the Vedas, even if you did not subscribe to a specific philosophy. 2 people could believe that Vishnu/Shiva is the Ishvara, hold a layman/elitist position on Moksha, be pacifistic/a warrior etc whilst still having in common the eternal way put forward in a shared grand mythology and even taking from each others scriptures (e.g. It not being unheard of for Shaivanites to discuss the Gita) in a way that is still philosophically consistent. I can be a devotee of Krishna and look at Vishnu as the embodiment of the wild for instance, justifying and fitting it in to my world view whilst being consistent to the joint mythology
Even with all of that, Hinduism's survival was far from guaranteed. It regularly had to fight to survive often by the skin of its teeth and often by radically changing what it was in the face of populist religions and rival philosophies.
Neoplatonism doesn't have that, nor does Pagan Europe. To do well and become populist, Neoplatonism had to wed itself to various other religions because it has no real mythology of its own to wed itself, and certainly no shared one. One issue that Neoplatonist purists and stoics had OTL was that the gods they followed really didn't match up well to the "logos" ideal, ending in them being imperfect "shadows" of the logos and potentially reffering to them in a way which would not be popular.
Compare this to where Neoplatonism was successful and it becomes more clear. Gnosticism was super divided and inconsistent because there was no one way to apply it to Ann abrahamic context (Making the Old Testament largely th story of an evil entity is not going to curry much in the way of favours) and Manichaeism was relatively successful but could never truly entrench itself compared to those who took Neoplatonism "lite" (e.g. Mainstream Christianity and Sufi Islam).
Across the med, yes. Not neccesarily far up north. But even in the med, there wasn't the same strength of resources for everyone to refer back to like in the Indian subcontinent.Still, the Western paganisms weren't so hopeless. Across the Mediterranean, a shared synthesised mythology had developed since classical Greek times.
This isn't the same as having a philosophical set of texts to refer to. By the time there was a shared "med culture", a lot of what we take for granted on the myths and legends had been lost; nevermind a lot of important texts.People from opposing philosophical backgrounds still viewed themselves as belonging and formed by that culture.
Because it never really did OTL. There is a significant difference between recognising other's gods as your own, and actually incorporating their gods into your own. A lot of celtic and germanic gods just kinda died off or where ignored.This culture had absorbed punic and anatolian traditions. Had it modernised during late Antiquity, why would it not synthesise Slavic and germanic paganisms which weren't so very different, not even in the eyes of the contemporaries.
Number one, nerf Christianity, number two, wank Neoplatonism. Insert a great philosopher or two in Slavic Europe, and by 1000 AD, Slavic Europe ends up with a full-formed, well-organised religion akin to Slavic Hinduism. It will have some manner of philosophy surrounding it too, as Hinduism always had. And the extent of Slavic Europe is probably far more in this timeline, probably to the Elbe as well as most of Southern Austria, and unlike OTL, not likely to be dislodged thanks to conquest/assimilation or such.
Is that good enough of a wank? It seems like a start.
Even independant of the niche it filled, Christianity still had a hell of a lot going for it. It had populist elements whilst holding enough of neoplatonism that people felt they could devote themselves to it.
It naturally had structure to it, and even though that structure has had many forms the idea of the preist and the elect is common to a lot of surviving religions; Manichaeism as the most succesful neoplatonist/gnostic religion for instance borrowed it's structures from Buddhism. Neoplatonism was so bound to philosophers and an elite, that without some very far back POD (which would probably butterfly christianity) it is going to have to build itself upon something as formidable as Christianity.
"Neoplatonism" just didn't have that. You can't get that much more populist than manichaeism did without it only paying tribute to neoplatonism.
There are just some religions that are going to have trouble. Jainism for instance is a fantastic one, where outside of some reform changing it so drastically that it is hard to recognise it as the same religion, having it's most holy men and women survive on so little whilst wearing nothing is a recipe for disaster when you have to travel across desert or mountain ranges to get anywhere. Likewise, Neoplatonism unfortunately came about in a culture which was a poor fit (god wise), with no real shared mythology to draw upon (note, it could share but others could not with it) and it never got large enough to have a significant cultural identity behind it.
Weirdly, I actually can see neoplatonism being a nice fit for a mass-movement stoicism, but that too would be hard to pull off.
Across the med, yes. Not neccesarily far up north. But even in the med, there wasn't the same strength of resources for everyone to refer back to like in the Indian subcontinent. This isn't the same as having a philosophical set of texts to refer to. By the time there was a shared "med culture", a lot of what we take for granted on the myths and legends had been lost; nevermind a lot of important texts. Because it never really did OTL. There is a significant difference between recognising other's gods as your own, and actually incorporating their gods into your own. A lot of celtic and germanic gods just kinda died off or where ignored.
There was such a religion, to all intents and purposes, in the later Hellenistic and Roman period. It unified and sort-of-reconciled divergent traditions under a universal concept of the divine (systematised by the Neoplatonic philosophers later on) and had its body of scripture (Homer, the Theogony, the various myths recorded in a number of collections, but at that time much more present in oral tradition, a presumably large, but now almost extinct body of song and story, and the interpretative works of a large number of revered teachers such as Plato, Apollonios, Saccas or Plotinus). Its survivability in the face of civilisational collapse was never tested, since the Theodosian Empire destroyed it, but it's quite conceivable that it would have developed into something broadly similar to Hinduism or traditional Chinese religion.
Well, it's not a religion of the book in the way that the Abrahamic faiths claim inerrancy for their respective books.
Outside of that, though, I don't see why the Iliad and Odyssey, the Homeric Hymns and the Works and Days, and even later lyric and dramatic works couldn't play the part of the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Rigveda, and the Upanishads.
The Vedas, however, are mostly about the old Vedic gods like Agni or Indra, and so aren't as relevant to modern Hindus the way the Quran is to Muslims or the Bible is to Christians. They're as relevant to modern Hinduism as the Homeric corpus is to the worship of popular gods of the Roman Empire like Isis, Dionysus, and Sol. So I don't see the lack of revealed texts as an impediment to a successful religion.
Hinduism isn't a single unified religion. It's diverse set of henotheisms (Vaishnavites, Shaivites, Shaktists, etc.), a set of philosophical schools (some of them atheistic or atomistic), and on ongoing rationalization of the Vedic gods found in the old epic texts. I imagine Hellenism (or whatever you would want to call it, but Hellenism is what ancient pagans identified their religion as in contrast to the Christians and others) would have developed in much the same way.
Already in Roman times henotheistic devotions existed alongside polytheistic folk traditions. The gods of the mysteries could easily become the pagan mainstream. Helios/Mitra, Kybele (the Greek Mother of Gods and Roman Magna Mater), and Dionysus could easily see the sort of glory that Vishnu/Krishna, Shakti, and Shiva get. At the same time, these popular pieties existed alongside Platonism, Plotinism, Epicureanism, Stoicism and all the rest. And finally there are the Olympian gods who would go the way of the Vedic gods, existing in folk traditions, art, and ancient myths, but mostly rationalized away.
As for a Western equivalent to dharma, if you really need one, why not Aristotle's obsession with virtue?
One doesn't need to make the Roman Empire more successful, you just need to keep people like Constantine out of the succession. Maximinus Daia was the first emperor to attempt the idea of organising the collective Pagan priesthoods into a single hierarchy, empowering the high priests as magistrates. Without Constantine's endorsement, any ideological shift within Roman Polytheism after 300 CE could occur if Christianity was still on the sidelines. The problem isn't cross-religious syncretism, but what new hierarchal structures and popularist ideologies could be applied to preserve traditional Polytheism.
So a bit like Lithuanian Christianity OTL?I actually wonder if a 'softer' Christianisation would work. Rather than outright taking control of the hearts and minds of the people, a less pervasive form of Christianity ends up basically being absorbed by traditional Pagan faiths. Rod/Svarog is 'God', Perun takes on the role of Christ, and Veles becomes a Satanic figure. Other deities replace the Saints/the Virgin. This way you've concentrated religious worship around three main figures rather than across a whole host of minor gods and goddesses. Basically, allow Christianity to organise the native religion without destroying it.
...That is sort of what I was talking about and I presumed was taken as a given; particularly the underlined."Neoplatonism" isn't a religion and I don't know why people keep treating it like one. It's just a philosophical way to rationalize the gods. You think the average Christian peasant cared about the precise nature of Jesus' divine and human sides? Of course not. That kind of thinking (which was heavily influenced by Neoplatonism) was restricted to the elite. You have to look at the entire integrated system of "paganism", not just one small aspect. There's nothing stopping someone from rationalizing divinity through Neoplatonism and being a member of a Mystery Cult. They fill different needs.
Not in the same way. I think the best analogy I could give would be to look at this from the perspective of how they present metaphysics. The Vedic faiths from their early days had a comprehensive joint literature that (even if one did not directly worship the content of a specific book) could be seen as analogous to your own faith. In comparrison, nothing nearly remotely on the scale of the Mahabaratha, nevermind the Vedas exists in the Roman world; meaning that important questions such as the nature of the gods (are they shadows of the one? Are they a full pantheon or is that only a metaphor?), what happens when we die (do we reincarnate? Can we become gods? Is there an eternal afterlife?) and other major questions are by and large settled even in the early days in a way that gave the scholars of medieval and earlier India terminology to use whenever something went against the greater Vedic canon; Astika as the position of accepting Vedic epistemology and Nastika as the position of rejecting it.And there were important and respected texts to refer to.
I don't feel quite fair in adressing the quotes as I don't know the full context, but I do have some things to say about them.TBH I don't really get how "Hellenism" and Hinduism are so different. They seem to have a lot of similarities to me. To quote from @carlton_bach and @jakewilson
There's even a possibility for a Brahman equivalent as @Lysandros Aikiedes points out:
I don't see any real evidence that such a unified religion did fully exist. I see evidence of people trying to force one (e.g. Julian the Apostate) but no true sense of unity; I don't know for instance that the hybrid positions of the Cult of Sibyl/Sol Invictus/traditional paganism thing he had going on was reflective or approved of throughout the med, and I could see conflicts between it and the Isis/Osiris fertility cults which appreciated a duality where he did not.There was such a religion, to all intents and purposes, in the later Hellenistic and Roman period. It unified and sort-of-reconciled divergent traditions under a universal concept of the divine (systematised by the Neoplatonic philosophers later on) and had its body of scripture (Homer, the Theogony, the various myths recorded in a number of collections, but at that time much more present in oral tradition, a presumably large, but now almost extinct body of song and story, and the interpretative works of a large number of revered teachers such as Plato, Apollonios, Saccas or Plotinus). Its survivability in the face of civilisational collapse was never tested, since the Theodosian Empire destroyed it, but it's quite conceivable that it would have developed into something broadly similar to Hinduism or traditional Chinese religion.
Because the books mentioned are full of references to the Vedas and are holy books in their own right which make a point of gaining authority from the Vedas.Well, it's not a religion of the book in the way that the Abrahamic faiths claim inerrancy for their respective books.
Outside of that, though, I don't see why the Iliad and Odyssey, the Homeric Hymns and the Works and Days, and even later lyric and dramatic works couldn't play the part of the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Rigveda, and the Upanishads.
Scripture doesn't behave the same way as in the Abrahamic faith, but every Hindu (and to a latter extent Sikh) I have spoken to personally would find that absurd. Also, considering the most succesful prosletysing variant of Hinduism (the Hare Krishnas) refers specifically to the Bhagavad Gita (a Purana) which in turn is dependant on the Vedas in a fashion which is quite typical for a Bhakti practitioner is a good example of the poppycock that would appear to be in that statement (again, don't know the context of the quote). If I had to guess, I would imagine that the confusion stems from the prevalance of Tantra or tantric like philosophies in many schools of Hinduism where one doesn't neccesarily need the Vedas, but that isn't any different from a Sufi who feels Allah as the source of their guidance.The Vedas, however, are mostly about the old Vedic gods like Agni or Indra, and so aren't as relevant to modern Hindus the way the Quran is to Muslims or the Bible is to Christians. They're as relevant to modern Hinduism as the Homeric corpus is to the worship of popular gods of the Roman Empire like Isis, Dionysus, and Sol. So I don't see the lack of revealed texts as an impediment to a successful religion.
There are some interesting conceptions here.Hinduism isn't a single unified religion. It's diverse set of henotheisms (Vaishnavites, Shaivites, Shaktists, etc.), a set of philosophical schools (some of them atheistic or atomistic), and on ongoing rationalization of the Vedic gods found in the old epic texts. I imagine Hellenism (or whatever you would want to call it, but Hellenism is what ancient pagans identified their religion as in contrast to the Christians and others) would have developed in much the same way.
Already in Roman times henotheistic devotions existed alongside polytheistic folk traditions. The gods of the mysteries could easily become the pagan mainstream. Helios/Mitra, Kybele (the Greek Mother of Gods and Roman Magna Mater), and Dionysus could easily see the sort of glory that Vishnu/Krishna, Shakti, and Shiva get. At the same time, these popular pieties existed alongside Platonism, Plotinism, Epicureanism, Stoicism and all the rest. And finally there are the Olympian gods who would go the way of the Vedic gods, existing in folk traditions, art, and ancient myths, but mostly rationalized away.
As for a Western equivalent to dharma, if you really need one, why not Aristotle's obsession with virtue?
<snip>
Sure! I'm looking forward to it.Coming back to this post, I think I can see what you mean. I still disagree but I've been reading up on the topic of Neoplatonism/the survival of "Paganism" and I'm gearing up for a thread to fully make my case in. Instead of responding here, I'll mention you with an @CountPeter when I make the thread and we can continue the debate there if you'd like.